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Title
The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness

Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0663j2rg

Journal
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11(1)

Author
Bucholtz, Mary

Publication Date
2001

Peer reviewed

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University of California
■ Mary Bucholtz
TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

The Whiteness of Nerds:

Superstandard English and Racial
Markedness

Anthropological research has shown that identities that are “not white
enough” may be racially marked. Yet marking may also be the result of being
“too white.” California high school students who embrace one such white
identity, nerds, employ a superstandard language variety to reject the youth
culture norm of coolness. These practices also ideologically position nerds as
hyperwhite by distancing them from the African American underpinnings of
European American youth culture.

A s the explosion of the study of whiteness throughout the past decade

continues with little sign of abatement, a corresponding set of
critiques about the field’s foundational assumptions has also begun
to emerge. Perhaps the most cogent of these critiques is the concern that in
viewing whiteness as a normative, hegemonic, and unmarked racial posi-
tion, scholars may be unwittingly reifying a singular and static version of
whiteness. It is not the concept of racial unmarkedness itself that creates the
problem but rather the common scholarly misperception that the un-
marked status of whiteness is impervious to history, culture, or other local
conditions. On the contrary, markedness theory, which can be traced back
to its origins in linguistic theory (Trubetzkoy 1969), has been usefully
extended to a broader semiotic context to provide a model of cultural
ideologies, including racial ideologies.1
Anthropology offers a perspective on markedness that is more sensitive
to the instability of racial marking, as demonstrated most recently and thor-
oughly by the work of John Hartigan (1999). Through a close ethnographic

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1):84–100. Copyright © 2001, American Anthropological

Association.

84
The Whiteness of Nerds 85

examination of the intraracial as well as interracial distinctions that shape

whiteness in Detroit, Hartigan shows that certain white identities, such as
“hillbillies,” are racially marked because their class orientation and cultural
style separate them from the middle-class white norm. Crucially, interracial
ties between hillbillies and African Americans also contribute to the view
that hillbillies display a “degraded form of whiteness” (Hartigan 1999:90).
Thus while all whites are racially marked vis-à-vis blacks in inner-city De-
troit insofar as their race is visible and salient, hillbillies are also racially
marked vis-à-vis other whites insofar as their version of whiteness is both
recognized and problematized as a racial subject position.
Hartigan’s work suggests that there may be other styles of whiteness that
are racially marked due to their lack of compliance with local ideologies of
racial appropriateness. In particular, it raises the question of whether it is
possible for white identities to be racially marked not for transgressing racial
boundaries but for maintaining such boundaries too assiduously—that is,
for being “too white.” The present article addresses this question by offering
an example of a white identity that is nonnormative, nonhegemonic, and
highly marked in the local racial economy. This identity, the nerd, is racially
marked precisely because individuals refuse to engage in cultural practices
that originate across racialized lines and instead construct their identities by
cleaving closely to the symbolic resources of an extreme whiteness, espe-
cially the resources of language.2
Nerds are members of a stigmatized social category who are stereotypi-
cally cast as intellectual overachievers and social underachievers. From the
Columbine High School killers to Microsoft monopolist Bill Gates, the label
nerd clearly has negative associations in American culture (especially when,
as in these cases, it is used to explain highly antisocial behaviors). It is also,
as such examples suggest, a cultural category that is both ideologically gen-
dered (male) and racialized (white), although these dimensions are not al-
ways contextually foregrounded. Despite such cultural images, to be a nerd
is not an inevitable social death sentence but instead is often a purposeful
choice that allows those who embrace this identity to reject locally dominant
social norms. In U.S. high schools, where such norms usually center on
participation in youth culture, nerds stand out for their resistance to current
trends, and more generally for their rejection of coolness as a desirable social
goal.3 As the basic value of youth culture, coolness may be defined as en-
gagement with and participation in the trends and practices of youth cul-
ture; it frequently involves a stance of affectlessness as well. In rejecting
coolness, students who consider themselves nerds signal their distance from
both the practices and the stances of trendier youth. Instead, they embrace
the values of nerdiness, primarily intelligence. But in so doing, especially
in contexts of racial diversity, the oppositional identity of the nerd becomes
as salient for its racialized position as for its subcultural orientation.

Youth Culture and Racial Appropriation

One such context is Bay City High School, a large urban high school in
the San Francisco Bay Area where I conducted a year of fieldwork in
86 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

1995–96.4 In spite of the school’s tremendous racial and ethnic diversity,

resulting in the visibility of whiteness as a racial category, white students
at Bay City High frequently operated according to an ideological dichotomy
between African Americans and European Americans, the two largest ra-
cialized groups at the school. This binary put many European American
students into a double bind: on the one hand, they were often monitored
by their white peers for incursions of blackness into their cultural styles,
but on the other hand, many of the practices of European American youth
cultures, including linguistic practices, are borrowed from African American
teenagers. To remain both culturally and racially acceptable, white students
had to maintain a delicate balance between embracing coolness and avoid-
ing cultural practices that were racialized as black by their European Ameri-
can peers.
The black origins of many elements of youth culture in the United States
have been well documented; trends in music, dance, fashion, sports, and
language in a variety of youth subcultures are often traceable to an African
American source (e.g., Kiesling, this issue; Lhamon 1990; Rose 1994). This
connection is often obscured, however, for as increasing numbers of Euro-
pean American teenagers embrace particular black cultural practices, these
practices become detached from blackness—they become deracialized, or ra-
cially unmarked, at least in the eyes of the white youths who participate in
them. At the same time, such practices often lose their urban associations
and become normalized in suburban and rural settings as well (witness the
expansion of rap in the past decades). Even the concept of coolness itself
stems from African American traditions (Morgan 1998).
As a result of their status as cultural innovators and trendsetters, black
students at Bay City High, as elsewhere around the country (Solomon 1988),
were often viewed by their white counterparts as cool almost by definition.
Yet for European American teenagers to adopt elements of African Ameri-
can youth culture before the deracializing process was well under way was
to risk being marked by their peers as racially problematic; this was the
situation for many white hip-hop fans at the school. Conversely, for white
teenagers to refuse to participate in youth culture in any form was likewise
problematic, not only culturally but racially. It may be said that appropriate
whiteness requires the appropriation of blackness, but only via those black
styles that are becoming deracialized and hence no longer inevitably confer
racial markedness on those who take them up.
White nerds disrupted this ideological arrangement by refusing to strive
for coolness. The linguistic and other social practices that they engaged in
indexed an uncool stance that was both culturally and racially marked: to
be uncool in the context of the white racial visibility at Bay City High was
to be racialized as hyperwhite, “too white.” Consequently, the production
of nerdiness via the rejection of coolness and the overt display of intelligence
was often simultaneously (though not necessarily intentionally) the produc-
tion of an extreme version of whiteness. Unlike the styles of cool European
American students, in nerdiness African American culture and language
did not play even a covert role. This is not to say that individuals who were
not white never engaged in nerdy practices, but that when they did they
The Whiteness of Nerds 87

could be culturally understood as aligned with whiteness. This phenomenon

is illustrated by the fact that, in U.S. culture generally, Asian Americans are
ideologically positioned as the “model minority”—that is, the racialized
group that most closely approaches “honorary” whiteness—in part because
they are ideologically positioned as the nerdy minority, skilled in scientific
and technical fields but utterly uncool (see Chun, this issue, for research
that challenges this ideology). In general, then, white nerds were identifying
not against blackness but against trendy whiteness, yet any dissociation
from white youth trends entailed a dissociation from the black cultural
forms from which those trends largely derive.
Membership in the nerd category, for purposes of this study, was not
assigned by me but reported by students themselves, both nerds and non-
nerds. Nerdiness is not an essence, of course, but a set of practices, engage-
ments, and stances, and individuals oriented to nerdiness to a greater or
lesser degree in their actions. Central to nerdy practice, as I have argued
elsewhere (Bucholtz 1998, 1999a), is a particular emphasis on language as
a resource for the production of an intelligent and nonconformist identity.
I focus on a linguistic practice that simultaneously indexed such identities
and marked speakers as non-normatively white: the use of superstandard
English.

Language Ideology and Superstandard English

As several contributions to this special issue point out, ideologies of race

are also ideologies of language, an unsurprising convergence given the long-
standing association between ethnoracial and linguistic differentiation pro-
moted both in early linguistic theorizing and in (other) nationalist projects
(Bauman and Briggs 2000). The ideology of racial markedness therefore has
as a corollary an ideology of linguistic markedness. In particular, the diffi-
culty (which afflicts only white people) in seeing whites as racialized is
matched by the difficulty (again, only for whites) in hearing white speakers’
language as racialized: as specifically white rather than neutral or norma-
tive—or standard. In such an arrangement, unmarked status confers power
by allowing whiteness to move through the social world ghost-like, unseen
and unheard, evident only in its effects. Likewise, the notion of a linguistic
“standard,” which in the U.S. context is closely bound up with whiteness
(Lippi-Green 1997), implies both unmarkedness (standard as ordinary) and
power (standard as regulative).
Although there are numerous sociolinguistic treatments of Standard Eng-
lish from a variety of perspectives (e.g., Crowley 1989; Milroy and Milroy
1999; Silverstein 1996), scholarly opinion is remarkably unanimous. In nearly
every discussion Standard English is located in opposition to nonstandard
English (and sometimes to other languages); many commentators point out
that Standard English, as it is usually defined, is not spoken at all but is a
particular register of written language; and a number of authors note that
Standard English does not, properly speaking, exist but rather is a prescrip-
tive ideal. Such analyses, valuable as they are for correcting misapprehen-
sions about the nature of sociolinguistic variation, do not always carefully
88 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

distinguish between the notion of an idealized prescriptive standard, usually

based on formal written language, and the spoken vernacular believed most
closely to approximate it. This spoken Standard English, as a primarily in-
formal or colloquial variety, differs from formal written Standard English
(Carter 1999; Cheshire 1999) but is still granted ideological authority as “the
standard.” Thus spoken Standard English is positioned in relation not only
to nonstandard English but also to what I call superstandard English.5 A lin-
guistic superstandard is a variety that surpasses the prescriptive norm es-
tablished by the standard. While available to some standard and nonstan-
dard speakers as a special formal—and often written—register, when used
as a social rather than situational variety the superstandard is restricted
neither to formal contexts nor to written language. For some speakers, the
superstandard may be the everyday, “unmarked” variety for ordinary in-
teraction.
Superstandard English contrasts linguistically with Standard English in
its greater use of “supercorrect” linguistic variables: lexical formality, care-
fully articulated phonological forms, and prescriptively standard grammar.
It may also go beyond traditional norms of prescriptive correctness, to the
point of occasionally over-applying prescriptive rules and producing hy-
percorrect forms. But the recognition of such difference is at least as ideo-
logically as linguistically motivated. It is precisely because of the robustness
of the ideology of Standard English in the United States that those linguistic
varieties generally classified as nonstandard—African American Vernacular
English foremost among them—are regularly held up as divergent from the
standard despite considerable overlap in grammar, phonology, and the lexi-
con. By the same token, the superstandard need not deviate substantively
from the colloquial standard in order to be considered distinctive; because
it is marked with respect to Standard English forms, even relatively slight
use of supercorrection and hypercorrection can call attention to itself. Su-
perstandard English is therefore a marked variety that may contrast ideo-
logically both with the unmarked colloquial standard and with marked non-
standard English. However, because it draws on the prescriptive standard,
it also contributes to the linguistic ideologies that elevate one linguistic va-
riety over others. How these varieties come to be associated with particular
racial positions—that is, how they become racialized styles—is likewise the
work of ideology.

Ideologies of Style

Judith Irvine and Susan Gal (Irvine in press; Irvine and Gal 2000) have
delineated three semiotic processes through which language ideologies per-
form cultural work: iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure. Iconization is
the counterpart of indexicality, a semiotic process described in detail by
several linguistic anthropologists (e.g., Ochs 1990; Silverstein 1976). Indexi-
cality involves the establishment of a connection between a linguistic form
and its social significance through the recognition of their repeated conjunc-
tion; although there is no inevitable tie between form and meaning, it even-
tually comes to be seen as inevitable and hence ideological. In iconization,
The Whiteness of Nerds 89

the ideological tie between form and social meaning is stronger still: the
characteristics of a language are seen as a reflection of the essential charac-
teristics of its users. The relationship is therefore not merely one of (per-
ceived) juxtaposition, as in indexicality, but of (perceived) resemblance. The
second process that Irvine and Gal identify, fractal recursivity, also works
by analogy. A linguistic relationship thought to obtain in one kind of social
arrangement (e.g., situation-based register variation) may be replicated in
other arrangements as well, at levels both more general (e.g., interspeaker
dialect variation) and more specific (e.g., intraspeaker stylistic variation)
than the initiating arrangement. Such reiteration of the same semiotic rela-
tionship on different orders of magnitude, akin to fractal geometry, is what
is meant by fractal recursivity. Erasure, the third semiotic process employed
in language ideologies, involves not reproduction but reduction; sociolin-
guistic phenomena that clash with, fail to conform to, or otherwise threaten
a given language ideology may be systematically ignored or denied, stricken
from the ideological record.
Because this framework is semiotic and not exclusively linguistic, it may
be expanded to include the interaction of nonlinguistic and linguistic ide-
ologies as well as the process whereby the former give rise to the latter.
That is, these semiotic processes are operative not only within language
ideologies but also across ideological families, so that ideologies of language
may be mapped onto corresponding ideologies of race, which they support.
The set of language ideologies that this article is concerned with surround
Standard English and its alternatives superstandard English and African
American Vernacular English (AAVE); the set of racial ideologies at issue
involves whiteness and its alternatives hyperwhiteness and blackness.
Through iconization, the (ideologically arrived-at) characteristics of each lan-
guage variety come to typify (and not simply to index) the youth subculture
that uses (or is thought to use) it; through fractal recursivity this mapping
is replicated on the racial level by linking language varieties to racialized
groups; through erasure one such set of mappings is taken as most “basic”
and hence least recognizable—in other words, these mappings are un-
marked.6

Nerds and Slang

In their use of superstandard English to set themselves apart from cool

students, nerds at Bay City High showed an awareness of some of these
ideological dimensions. One characteristic of superstandard English is its
lack of current slang. By avoiding particular linguistic forms, speakers can
separate themselves from the social category indexically associated with
such forms; thus the absence of slang in nerds’ speech symbolically dis-
tanced them from their cooler peers. When I asked nerdy students to discuss
current slang, which other students usually found the most enjoyable part
of the interviews I conducted, most expressed dismay at the task and pro-
fessed unfamiliarity with the terms (one of the rare instances when the nerdy
teenagers I spoke to were willing to admit to ignorance). They also removed
themselves from the slang terms they did know in various ways, such as
90 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

providing literal, nonslang definitions for the slang terms I presented to

them on slips of paper (Example 1) or offering nonslang terms that convey
the same meaning (Example 2).
In Example 1, Bob, Conqueror of the Universe, announces to her friends
the slang word (blood), an affiliative address term, which is printed on the
slip of paper she has selected:7
1. Bob: [blq:d]. B-L. O-O. D. The word is [bl√d]. . . . That’s the stuff which is
inside of your veins. That’s the stuff that—I don’t know. I haven’t
gotten to that chapter yet.

Bob turns the task of defining slang terms into a quasi-academic activity by
humorously invoking the format of a spelling bee (state the word, spell it,
restate it). This academic orientation continues in her formal, literal defini-
tion of the term and her allusion to one of her textbooks where the answer
can be found. Through such strategies Bob repeatedly distances herself
from the use of slang while simultaneously invoking discourse genres and
topics associated with intelligence.
Where Bob emphasizes her unfamiliarity with this slang term (even as
she reveals her awareness of it through a marked, “black,” pronunciation,
as discussed below), Erich asserts that the absence of slang in his lexicon is
a matter of preference. As with other people, I asked Erich to comment on
which of the printed slang terms he uses. In response, Erich rejects slang
as a whole while making clear that some of the activities that the words
refer to are relevant to his life:

2. Erich: The idea behind the term fits but the term itself doesn’t- isn’t the
way I prefer it to be. Like “kick back.” I just prefer something- some
normal term. . . . Like “to relax.”. . . Something like that.

Erich’s view of slang involves a process of iconization that brings youthful

trendiness into the pragmatic orbit of such lexical items. Just as slang is
trendy (not “normal”), so too are its speakers. Erich avoids slang not be-
cause of its referential meaning but because of the semiotic meaning that
iconization assigns to it.
Of course, students who described themselves as nerds did use some
slang, particularly older terms. But these items were often marked in some
way in their speech, as when Claire explained why she does not like many
people:

3. Claire: When it seems to me that people are really young <i.e., immature>,
it’s like their emotional response to different things just seems
[dZ√st simz] really w-(.) wacked.

Claire’s utterance of the slang term wack(ed) is preceded by a false start and
a brief pause, both signals of some kind of production difficulty. Whether
her hesitance is due to uncertainty about the term or simply its appropri-
ateness in front of me, it highlights the word as unusual for Claire, at least
in this context. Supporting this interpretation is her formal, careful language
The Whiteness of Nerds 91

elsewhere in her turn (such as emotional response and the full articulation of
just seems) and the standardized form of the slang term itself, which more
usually occurred as wack. In adding a Standard English past participial
marker to a word popularized by African American students, then, Claire
reveals that she is not quite as cool as her use of the term might imply. (At
the time of the study, Claire was deliberately trying to become cooler,
mainly by smoking marijuana, while retaining her commitment to nerdy
ideals like intelligence.) What is more, her standardization of African Ameri-
can Vernacular English grammar is not racially neutral: through fractal re-
cursivity, the two variants Claire chooses between are linked to racial cate-
gories. Hence the supercorrect wacked is not only more standard but also
whiter than the original term.

The Phonology of Superstandard English

The recursivity seen in Example 3 participates in a widespread racialized

language ideology. Among European American students at Bay City High
School, a three-way ideological division of English corresponded to similarly
ideologically based social divisions: most students of color were thought to
speak nonstandard English, most white students were thought to speak
colloquial Standard English, and nerds, who did not always incorporate
colloquial forms into their speech, were heard to speak an exaggeratedly
formal version of Standard English; that is, superstandard English. Super-
standard English, unlike Standard English, was a marked linguistic variety
among European American students at Bay City High School. Evoking the
registers of scholarship and science, nerds’ use of superstandard English
produced a very different kind of identity than did the colloquial Standard
English used by cooler students. And as noted above, because of the ideo-
logical force of Standard English, even the slightest use of marked linguistic
forms could be sufficient to produce a semiotic distinction. Thus in nerds’
speech colloquial forms are juxtaposed with superstandard varieties (a vio-
lation of Ervin-Tripp’s [1973] “co-occurrence rules”). As with most linguistic
variables, the use of superstandard features is not categorical.
One linguistic strategy that nerds used to make their speech distinctive
was to imbue it with a measured quality, which lent a certain gravitas to
their words, particularly as a result of resistance to phonological processes
characteristic of colloquial speech, such as consonant-cluster simplification
and the phonological reduction of unstressed vowels. Claire’s pronunciation
in Example 3 above illustrates the former pattern; Example 4 exemplifies
the latter. In 4a, Erich describes his difficulties with another student in the
school’s computer club; in 4b he talks about construction problems in his
neighborhood.

4a. He made up all these rules that he sort o- we sort of voted on and I didn’t
vote on them [DEm] because I wasn’t there that day, and I have to abide by
them [DEm].
4b. They’re going to [go IN tu] have to [hæv tu] change- close off streets . . .
92 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Erich’s careful pronunciation in these examples is all the more remarkable

given that the items in Example 4 occur in linguistic contexts that favor the
phonological reduction of these words to ’em, goin’ or gonna, and hafta. The
lack of stress on both tokens of them in 4a, the nasal of on preceding the first
token, and the grammaticalized function of going (to) and have (to) in 4b all
promote reduced phonological forms, but Erich resists the effects of linguis-
tic environment on his speech.
This precisely enunciated speech style has semiotic connections to literacy:
nerdy teenagers frequently used something akin to “reading style” (Labov
1972) even in their spontaneous conversations.8 Indeed, nerdy students oc-
casionally employed pronunciations based on spelling rather than speech,
such as [folk] for folk and [hfN kfNg] for Hong Kong, as well as noncustomary
pronunciations of words they encountered in their extensive reading but
had not heard uttered aloud: for example, Loden pronounced her pseudo-
nym as [lAdn] rather than the more usual [lodn]; the name came from a
class assignment. Here again iconization is at work. Nerds’ careful speech
style approximates in the spoken channel the linguistic forms as they would
be written (this is especially clear in the use of spelling pronunciation).
This iconic link between careful speech and reading, moreover, forms the
basis of a secondary link between careful speech and intelligence, via the
(ideological) indexical association of advanced literacy, extensive education,
and high intelligence. And intelligence in turn was associated, at least by
nerds, with independent thought: a refusal to go along with the crowd
whether in fashion or in phonology. The iconicity between resisting
phonological pressure and resisting peer pressure is a shortcut through the
chain of semiotic links already established. Erich invokes this association in
Example 5, in which he explains why he thinks the term sophisticated applies
to himself and his best friend, Micah:

5. Erich: We’re not sophisticated in a bad sense, we just have uh much-

we’re much more advanc:ed (.) in terms of uh (.) (xxx) in terms of
the our- our ways of perceiving things, at least (.) myself and
Micah. <Mary: What do you mean by that?> We don’t think- I don’t
think of anything in a no:rmal way:, <Mary: Mm.> like uh and I
don’t- I use much more, I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t use
all the abbreviations for words? <Mary: Hm.> Like most people
abbreviate- cut off half the words? For no particular reason? And I
don’t do that. hhh <Mary: Like, do you have an example of that?> Uh
uh they they they they cut off the “g” on the end of “tripping”
[trIpIN˘] <Mary: Mm. Right.> (and end,) N apostrophe. It makes it
makes no sense to me.

Erich connects sophistication, in its positive (i.e., nontrendy) sense, both to

“advanced” and unconventional perspectives and to careful pronunciation.
From the more elevated position that sophistication affords, the colloquial
style of youth culture (and of U.S. culture more widely) simply “makes no
sense.” Here again Erich displays his rather clinical knowledge of slang
even as he distances himself from it. His fastidious pronunciation of the
slang word tripping, with a full superstandard [N], is the linguistic equivalent of
The Whiteness of Nerds 93

holding a particularly distasteful scientific specimen between thumb and

forefinger for inspection before it is discarded. This blending of casual and
formal language allows Erich to display knowledge without embracing the
identity usually associated with such knowledge. Aware of my interest in
language, Erich takes a researcherly analytic stance toward his own linguis-
tic style.

Superstandard Grammar and Lexis

Related to the phonological formality of nerdy speech is its lexical for-

mality. Nerds often chose formal-register polysyllabic variants of Greco-Lat-
inate origin over more colloquial Germanic monosyllables, a longstanding
stylistic distinction based on ideologies in the history of the English lan-
guage. But where in Standard English these lexical items are associated with
different registers, in superstandard English they were used across registers.
Such lexical items therefore had the indexical effect of making speakers
sound smart or learned. In Examples 6a and b, Erich discusses how he is
different from other students at Bay City High:

6a. I just can’t stand people who have all the outward signs of being an
extremely stupid person.
6b. My observation is that other people think we’re kind of foolish and crazy
for the way we do things.

Erich’s choice of the Latinate intensifier extremely and the nominalized form
observation invests his discourse with a formal, literate tone; additionally, as
in Example 5 both examples invoke a stance of scientific objectivity and de-
tached empiricism, here achieved through such collocations as all the out-
ward signs and My observation is. In Example 7 Claire takes a similar stance in
responding to a question from me about what term she uses for male high-
school students:
7. Claire: I-I-I tend to-to refer to (.) the whole (.) um Y chromosome (.) as a guy.

Claire’s lexical choices are formal: tend, refer. And in invoking the register of
biology (the whole (.) um Y chromosome (.)) she participates in the same nerdy
practice of scientific discourse already exemplified by Erich. The deliberate-
ness of Claire’s choice is suggested by the brief pauses that bracket and
highlight the term. Like Erich, Claire understands our interaction to be a
shared intellectual enterprise, and she repeatedly demonstrates her ability
to engage in the scientific discourse of research. Where her use of slang in
Example 3 above showed a similar linguistic self-awareness, the effect of
this awareness is quite different in each case. The hesitancy in the earlier ex-
ample is not in evidence here. Instead, the pauses preceding and following
the phrase Y chromosome operate like quotation marks, not only emphasiz-
ing the term but also displaying Claire’s consciousness of its markedness.
Her utterance thus also illustrates the process of erasure: in highlighting her
use of superstandard lexis, she implies the existence of an unmarked
(standard) norm. It is at such moments that nerdiness moves from practice
94 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

to performance, a move that is partly explicable in light of Claire’s identity

change-in-progess.
Undoubtedly, my role as a researcher triggered this analytic style in some
students, and in fact all the teenagers I interviewed engaged in style-shifting
to some degree, as compared with their interactions with their friends. How-
ever, although all the teenagers I interviewed adjusted their speech to the
situation, only those who engaged in other nerdy practices, and often
adopted the nerd label as well, used superstandard English. Moreover, such
teenagers employed this style even in interaction with their friends, a prac-
tice that I witnessed among no other teenagers.

Hyperwhiteness and the Rejection of Cool

By distancing themselves from their cool white peers, nerds at Bay City
High School created an even greater distance between themselves and their
cool black peers. Although nerds did not necessarily understand their lin-
guistic and other social practices in particularly racialized terms, these prac-
tices could take on racialized meaning in the context of the ideological black-
white dichotomy that shaped whiteness for European American students
at Bay City High. Nerdy teenagers’ deliberate avoidance of slang, for ex-
ample, indexically displayed their remoteness from the trends not only of
white youth culture but of black youth culture as well, since African Ameri-
can slang was a primary source of European American slang. While this
was not necessarily an intended consequence, Example 1 provides evidence
that nerds defined themselves in opposition to both coolness and blackness.
Bob first utters the word blood (a term used by many African American
boys at Bay City High) with stereotyped African American Vernacular Eng-
lish phonology and exaggerated intonation: [blq:d]. Her marking of AAVE
speakers in this example expresses the ideological distance between her
identity and that of African American youth. Her return to her normal pro-
nunciation in the second utterance of this word ([bl√d]) coincides with her
attempt to provide a nonslang definition for the term. With this switch,
coolness and blackness are recursively linked to each other and separated
from the world of nerds.
Likewise, if the use of superstandard English worked to separate nerdy
teenagers from their trendy white counterparts who generally spoke a more
colloquial variety of Standard English, it also enforced a division between
white nerds and most black students at Bay City High, who tended to use
AAVE as their primary linguistic variety. The colloquial Standard English
favored by cool white teenagers elided to some extent the structural differ-
ences between itself and AAVE (thereby allowing them a greater linguistic
claim to coolness). Superstandard English, however, reinforced this racial-
ized linguistic divide by exaggerating and highlighting the semiotic ele-
ments of Standard English that distinguish it from nonstandard forms of
African American English.
Nerdy performances of intellectual ability also produced racialized dif-
ference, as suggested by Signithia Fordham’s (1996) ethnographic study of
academically successful students in a black high school. Fordham notes that
The Whiteness of Nerds 95

some high-achieving African American students were accused by their black

peers of “acting white” precisely because of their intellectual performance.
This charge was often accompanied by the pejorative epithet brainiac, a term
that, as Fordham makes clear, is racialized as black in much the same way
that the analogous but not synonymous term nerd is racialized as white
(1996:361, n. 2). At its most negative, the term brainiac refers to an African
American whose display of intellectual ability indicates a capitulation to
European American cultural values. To avoid being labeled brainiacs, black
students in Fordham’s study often hid or downplayed their academic ac-
complishments and demonstrated their engagement with the concerns of
African American youth culture. By contrast, nerdy white teenagers at Bay
City High presented themselves as fully engaged in academic endeavors
and other intellectual work and showed their indifference toward the youth
culture that surrounded them.9 Such practices constituted a counter-
hegemonic erasure of the devaluation of academic achievement, but they
also erased recognition of accomplished black (and white) students who
chose not to openly display their abilities.
Through the use of superstandard English and the semiotic work it per-
formed, nerds at Bay City High were classifiable not simply as white but
as hyperwhite. As the most extreme form of whiteness, nerds might be
expected to be the best—that is, most unmarked—example of that racial
category. But it was precisely the hyperwhiteness of nerds that marked them
as atypically white. In U.S. culture generally, the ideological norm of white-
ness needs blackness to operate, not only to establish an Other against which
to measure itself, but to provide cultural forms for whiteness to appropriate
and re-racialize. As groundbreaking scholarship in other disciplines has
shown (e.g., Lott 1993; Roediger 1991; Rogin 1996), whiteness is separated
from blackness in ideology but inextricable from it in practice. White nerds
at Bay City High violated this practice by refusing to appropriate African
American cultural and linguistic forms.
Besides expressing their distance from African Americans symbolically
and implicitly through linguistic and other social practices, some nerdy stu-
dents also explicitly stated this ideology of identity. Thus Christine in Ex-
ample 8 provides an overt statement that African American students are at
best useful to know, but only as protection against other African Americans
(see also Bucholtz 1999):

8. <In response to my question about whether she knows people in the “hip-
hop crowd,” a term she takes to mean “black students.”>
Christine: Well I know them.
I know (.) I know some people.
Which helps to alleviate situations sometimes.

Such sentiments insert a racialized subtext into the linguistic practices and
ideologies that separated nerds from African American youth language and
culture. Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to dis-
count the possibility of friendship with black students. In this sense, nerdy
teenagers’ social freedom in rejecting normative youth identities was
96 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

constrained by their acceptance of normative, ideologically rooted views of

their African American schoolmates.
The adoption of a cultural identity that could be read as hyperwhite did
not guarantee, however, that nerds promoted what were viewed as “white”
interests. During the time I was conducting fieldwork, a great deal of po-
litical debate in Bay City centered on the dismantling of affirmative action
in California’s higher education system. Erich was among the Bay City High
School students who organized large-scale protests against these measures;
meanwhile, many European American students who drew heavily upon
African American youth language and culture did not participate. The
wholehearted, or even halfhearted, appropriation of black cultural forms
did not ensure that trend-conscious white teenagers would also adopt a
political perspective that was sensitive to African American concerns. By
the same token, the rejection of the identity associated with trendy white
youth as it emerged from and reworked African American cultural practices
did not necessarily entail that nerds were similarly disengaged from the
politics of race. In challenging dominant ideologies of youth culture, nerds
both reinscribed and revised prevailing models of whiteness.

Conclusion

White nerds inhabited an ambiguous racial position at Bay City High:

they were the whitest group but not the prototypical representatives of
whiteness. It is likewise difficult to disambiguate nerds’ relationship to white
domination. In refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white
youth cultures are founded, nerds may be viewed as traitors to whiteness.
But engaging in nerdy practices may itself be a form of white privilege,
since these practices were not as readily available to teenagers of color and
the consequences of their use more severe. The use of superstandard English
is thus both a rejection of the cool white local norm and an investment in
a wider institutional and cultural norm. This ambivalence toward normative
practice is evident in Erich’s discourse: he uses “normal” language rather
than slang, but he does not “think of anything in a normal way.” In the
first use, he aligns himself with “normalness” and against trendiness; in the
second use, he disaligns himself from both “normalness” and trendiness.
These two valences of normal are akin to the two valences of whiteness in
nerd identity: nerds at Bay City High were not normal because they were
too normal, not (unmarkedly) white because they were too white.
In other words, the linguistic and other social practices by which nerds
were culturally marked with respect to other, cooler, white students, also
caused them to be racially marked with respect to both blacks and whites.
While the semiotic processes of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure
allowed nerds to challenge local ideologies based on subcultural identity,
these same processes also imposed a set of racial ideologies on both nerds
and their cooler counterparts, black and white. Thus although the marked
hyperwhiteness of nerds undermines the racial project of whiteness as a
normative and unmarked construct, it may also shore up racial ideologies
of difference and division.
The Whiteness of Nerds 97

Notes
Acknowledgments. I am grateful to Karen Brodkin, John Clark, Alessandro
Duranti, Sara Trechter, and two anonymous reviewers for comments and sugges-
tions. All remaining weaknesses are my own responsibility.
1. For an updating of this model, see the introduction to this issue.
2. Although, as I discuss below, nerds and similar identities exist in other racial-
ized groups, in this article my focus is solely on white nerds. Some of the speakers I
discuss identify as Jewish to varying degrees, but while many Jews understand
themselves to be racially marked by their ethnicity (Modan, this issue), hence “not
quite white,” these teenagers do not discuss their ethnicity in similar terms. It ap-
pears that in the Bay City High School context ethnicity is less salient than a racial-
ized cultural style. However, Brodkin (1998:31) points to the pattern, early in the
twentieth century, of Jewish academic achievement in higher education, “a setting
where disparagement of intellectual pursuits and the gentleman C were badges of
distinction.” Hence there may be a historical white ideology linking Jewishness and
nerdiness, although such an ideology is not operative at Bay City High, except
through ironic exploitation by Jews themselves.
3. While it may be argued that nerds participate in their own version of youth cul-
ture rather than rejecting it altogether, the practices associated with nerdiness are
not primarily associated with youth nor do they perform an age-based identity in
the same way as the practices associated with (dominant) youth culture.
4. All names and identifying information have been changed. Speakers chose
their own pseudonyms.
5. I use the terms superstandard and supercorrect to distinguish between true hy-
percorrect language use (that is, use that violates a rule of descriptive grammar) and
strict adherence to prescriptive grammatical rules accompanied by the use of other
formal language features. As discussed below, however, hypercorrection is often
part of superstandard English.
6. This kind of erasure—in which a powerful group is rendered less available to
scrutiny—is not discussed by Irvine and Gal, who focus on cases of erasure in which
less powerful groups are marginalized. The ideological erasure of subordinated
groups also occurs at Bay City High, as for example in the racial ideology of a black-
white binary, which erases the presence of Asian Americans, Latinos, and other stu-
dents.
7. Transcription conventions are as follows: a period indicates falling intonation;
a question mark indicates rising intonation; a comma indicates fall-rise intonation; a
hyphen indicates a self-interruption that breaks the intonation unit; a dash indicates
a self-interruption that breaks a word; between words, a hyphen indicates rapid
speech; a (.) indicates a pause of less than one-tenth of a second; ellipsis indicates de-
leted text; (xxx) indicates unintelligible speech; hhh indicates laughter; angled
brackets indicate transcriber comments or turns that are not the focus of analysis;
and phonetic transcription appears in square brackets.
8. The resistance to assimilation processes does not, of course, have a single social
meaning. In other contexts, researchers have found that some gay men may also use
careful articulation (Campbell-Kibler et al. in press; Walters cited in Barrett
1997:192) without any apparent association with bookishness. In fact, it is quite un-
likely that careful articulation has only a single meaning even for nerds.
9. It is important to note, however, that contrary to the claims of conservative
commentators like John McWhorter (2000), African American students do not show
any less enthusiasm for school—and in fact may show more—than European
Americans (see Voelkl 1997).
98 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

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Department of English
Texas A&M University
TAMU 4227
College Station, TX 77843-4227
bucholtz@tamu.edu